Comment by MisterTea
Overdrawn was the first MST3K episode I saw. I was randomly flipping cable channels and saw this silhouette of some characters watching a movie with this fat guy barking orders and decided to watch. Within minutes I was laughing so hard I couldn't breathe. I was instantly hooked.
I downloaded a torrent long ago (missing the KTMA episodes) so I have nearly all of them. During the pandemic lock-down Joel/Mike, the bots and the mads kept me company. When a close friend was deployed in Iraq in the 00's I would burn episodes to DVD and send them to him in his mothers care packages and he had the whole platoon watching and laughing. There are so many good episodes but Time Chasers, Overdrawn, Space Mutiny, Death Stalker, Bride of the Monster, and Devil fish are my favorites.
I really like the episode time of the apes. I think it’s a sandy frank movie. Sandy Frank was a tv producer who, amongst other things, would buy distribution rights to Japanese television shows and recut them into feature length movies for American markets. Time of the apes is one of these where children get sent to the future and find that earth is now run by apes but there are also humans still and weird aliens. It’s all kind of nonsensical especially since it’s a 26 half hour long episode television show cut into 1.5 hours run time then again cut into the runtime of mst3k.
I really like time chasers because David giancola films are not what you want to see. I lived near where David giancola lives in Vermont during high school and he was considered a real movie maker. Like people would talk about him like he was mr Hollywood. It was wild. It’s true, he has made a lot of films. But for some reason he refuses to leave Vermont no matter what the subject of his films are. This is why futuristic cities look a lot like back alleys of Rutland or middlebury and big company offices look like the corner of a library in time chasers. I used to think this movie is the best episode of mst3k but actually I think the movie makes more sense if you watch the original and not the cut up one. Some of the scenes that are left out explain some of the plot more. David giancola definitely cornered the market on being a filmmaker in Vermont. Nobody else is making as many feature films there as a setting for anything but Vermont. But that may not be a recipe for a good movie. That’s always the problem with a David Giancola film. For some reason it wants to leave Vermont but David Giancola does not. So everything feels a bit Vermonty.
I think a lot of movies like space mutiny are really fun but end up being so lazy. It’s like they had access to some kind of facility to shoot in plus some cardboard sets and Cameron mitchell. Movies like that are campy and fun but at some point you ask yourself what was the vision here? Like their vision for space mutiny was literally battle star galactica but without the cylons. So they wanted it to be more boring?
That’s why I always return to Overdrawn at the Memory Bank. I continue to see a filmmaker’s vision even though I don’t understand it.